Vizualizing Similarity with Circos
20 Aug 2008The magazine American Scientist has a cover image this month featuring a circular vizualization of similarity between the human and canine genomes.
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It's done using the Circos project, a perl vizualization framework for linked data (it's written with an eye towards genomics, but appears to work for any tabular data).
They even have an online generator that takes tabular data and offers a range of settings. If you're confused with regards to how to read the charts, the about page explains it.
The output seems a little busy, but that's probably mainly a consequence of the input data. I'm planning to give it a try tonight and report back with my findings.